


Like Real People Do

by shadesfalcon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, First Meetings, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Past Torture, Song Lyrics, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 18:48:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2592356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadesfalcon/pseuds/shadesfalcon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The prompt was, "how about a long drive home on a high way and /their/ song comes on and they argue about it being their song so on and so on... And it's all sarcastic and gut wrenching and filled with flashbacks and then they just accept their song with the silence of the highway on their backs."<br/>Which was a work of poetry in and of itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Real People Do

They’re doing over a hundred miles an hour under the bright hot summer sun, daring a cop to chase them, kinda hoping one tries. But it’s Arizona and the miles stretch too long. People die out here, sometimes, when they break down. No cop is going to be sitting in car with his windows up around the next turn.

Their windows are definitely not up, since the whole top of the little red coupe is down. Clint is at the wheel and Natasha is mostly in the passenger seat. “Mostly” because her head is on the console and her feet are hanging out of the car, over her side door. Neither of them are buckled and they can tastethe freedom in the wind on their bodies.

Natasha has on jean shorts that are barely there and if Clint swerves a couple of time when he lets himself get distracted, then it’s just a good thing there’s no one else out here.

The one downside is the radio. It’s finicky at best, station hopping and spitting out static. Upside to middle of nowhere? No people. Downside? Natasha’s going to rip the whole radio out of the car and throw it to the side of the road if she hears one more static-y shriek in the middle of a song she was actually enjoying. Even if it would mean she’d owe Clint a new radio.

She makes a gagging noise when “An Angel on Each Arm” comes on, but Clint’s the one who moves fast enough to hit the power button first.

“You don’t have any CDs?” she asks.

He gestures to the console under her head and retorts, “Didn’t want to disturb you, your highness.”

She sits up with a huff of annoyance and eyes him critically. “I would have moved for that. I’m not an invalid.” She’s referring to the barely-there slice around her midriff. Her red tank top covers the wound, if you can even call it that. It hadn’t even broken past the Camper’s fascia, long and thin and completely superficial. She and Clint have done more damage to each other in play.

“I liked you where you were.” He’s referring to the warmth of her head against his right arm and his ability to touch her face whenever he feels like it.

She twists a little, to get her head on the chair back, but stays curled up like a cat as she digs around in the center console, peeved but not surprised that there are a ton of CDs and absolutely no cases.

She hold up a particular disc, her index finger through the middle, and tilts it so he can see its title.

“Really? What’s on here really?”

It’s a burned CD and, scrawled in black sharpie, it’s labeled, “Brittany Avril and Other Power Songs” in a way that gets too small at the end, as the writer ran out of room.

“Exactly what it says.” He’s unashamed, and she’s proud of him for it. Not that “shame” was an emotion she’d ever seen on Clint. Not when he’d shown up naked in the Avengers briefing room, due to some elaborate prank that Tony had initiated and Bruce had gone alone with. Not when she had him underneath her, writhing and begging. Not when he’d admitted strange fears to her in the dead of night.

“Do we have a song?”

“Pardon?”

She hadn’t meant to ask it, it’s just so _sappy_ , but it’s out now, and she’s not one to be afraid.

“What’s ‘our’ song?”

She’s surprised when, rather than answering out loud, he reaches across to the glove compartment, opens it, and pulls out a lone CD. She’d have been touched at the sentimentally of separating it from the others, but it wasn’t like this one had a case either.

He sticks the disc in the empty player and pushes the skip button a few times. Her eyebrows shoot up at the first strands of the guitar, and her mind takes her back a decade.

 

_She’d mapped his pattern for over a week. It’s annoying and difficult in the best way, because it’s not really a “pattern” as much as it’s a “way of doing things.” Because this man is one of the best, and the best do not follow set schedules. Not unless they want to get shot._

_But she is also the best, and she doesn’t need a set schedule to guess when he will be places. She has watched him long enough to understand the way he thinks. At least, enough that she’s pretty sure he’ll be eating breakfast here in a few hours._

_She has everything set up, and several hours before he’ll be anywhere near the targeted area, and she only hesitates a moment before she slips the small white earbud into one ear._

_Her handler had slapped her full across the face when he’d first learned she’d used an ipod on the job. She almost took the hand off him for his trouble, but she didn’t. She did start making it a point to listen to the thing when she could, on mission or not._

_Part of it was defiance against an increasingly tiring allegiance. Part of it was because she was an arrogant little shit and she knew it, liked pretending she was good enough to divide her attention._

_Part of it was because she hadn’t been raised with music. Not like this. Oh, all the classics and anything that might come up at a particularly fancy dinner party, those she knew inside and out. And they were beautiful. But this is something new_.

_She’d been making her way through some pretty heavy rock, but the dark and twisted words from the mouths of people who had never known death and blood the way she did meant that she had recently strayed into a vague indie rock._

_She’s halfway through Hozier’s “Like Real People Do” when the shadow falls across her back. The sniper rifle she’s looking through doesn’t have the mobility to get it turned toward whoever just approached her from the side she’d put the earbud in._

_Her best option is the PSM pistol in her left side pocket. She’s trying to decide when’s the best time to go for it, when he speaks. And, in doing so, confirms her fear that it’s her target, her own target, who has just gotten the drop on her._

_“Watcha listening to?”_

_She forgoes going for the pistol to look up at him, squinting into the sun. He steps to the side a little so he blocks the bright light, so it doesn’t fall in her eyes. Obligingly. Stupidly. What the fuck is he doing?_

_Eating a donut. A legit donut. He’s got it in one hand with several bites out of it. His other hand is holding a Starbucks coffee cup, and she cannot figure out how he got up here with his hands full like that._

_“Katalepsy,” she lies, in answer to the question._

_“Mm-hm.” Said through a mouthful of donut in a way that makes her think that he doesn’t believe he, and that almost pisses her off._

_“What are you going to do when I go for my side arm? Throw a pastry at me?”_

_“I’d obviously throw the coffee, if you went for your side arm. Apparently there’s a law somewhere that coffee brewed for public consumption has to be so fucking hot that you just carry it around all day. It’s the real reason college kids are always holding Starbucks cups. They’re only buying one a day, but they have to lug it around till 2pm, when it’s finally a drinkable temperature.”_

_The question was supposed to have thrown him off. Not her._

“This is the song I was listening to when we first met. On the rooftop in Atlanta.”

“I knew you were lying to me. Katalepsy, my ass. Not with the way you were keeping time with your foot.”

She ignores the revelation that he’d apparently stood there watching her on the rooftop for longer than she’d thought, and instead says, “If you didn’t know this is the song I was listening to, then why do you think it’s our song?”

He makes a weird face. “Well. It’s actually kind of weird that that’s the song you had on. Because it’s actually what I was listening to when I first saw you.”

“You didn’t have an ipod in when we met.”

“I didn’t say met. I said saw.”

“You never wore an ipod on that mission. I know. I wrote it down in my head, under the ‘personal habits’ section. You don’t listen to music from personalized electronics on missions.”

“Unlike someone I know.”

“Shut up. And explain yourself.”

“Uh, can’t do both, pet.”

She’s tempted to hit him, but her head is back on the center consul and it would take more effort than she’s willing to exert at the moment. Fortunately, he makes the wise choice and answers her question.

“It was in the O’Hare airport. It was first time flying on a commercial airline in several years, and I was pissed off about it. I was heading out to visit some old friends, non-SHIELD friends, and was kinda pissed about not being allowed to take a jet.”

“Because that’s never a difficult one to explain to old friends. ‘Oh, where did you park?’ ‘Out back.’ ‘There’s nothing but a field out back.’ ‘I know.’ Seriously, of course you didn’t get clearance to-”

He shuts her up with a kiss, gentle and quick before he sits back up to return his eyes to the road. “Anyway. I’m pissed about flying commercial and decide to grab a beer. So I’m sitting at the bar, cold glass in one hand and my ipod in the other, playing this song, when I see a flash of red hair. See, I’ve always been partial to redheads.” Small smirks shared between them. “And I looked up on reflex. And there you were, in all your black-list glory, strutting down the hall like it was a runway.”

“What? What the fuck was I doing in the O’Hare…” She trails off. “Ok. No, ok. I know what I was doing there. Go on. What did you do?”

“I called my handler.” He laughs. “You’d probably kill to get your hands on the recording of that phone call. I was panicking. Like, legit high-pitched breaks in my voice. I thought you were there for me. Even though I hadn’t nearly made enough of a name for myself at that point.”

“I don’t understand. If you were surprised to see me, how was it that you were there at the same time I was?”

“You’re missing the point completely. I wasn’t tracking you. Not at all. I literally happened to be in the same airport as you, on one of the only days in all of time that either of us flew commercial. I happened to grab a beer, and you happened to walk by, and I happened to recognize you.”

She struggles into a normal sitting position, so she can lean over and really look at him. “While listening to this song? _This_ song! The same one I’d be listening to fourteen months later on a rooftop in Atlanta?”

“Yep.”

She turns to look out the window and watch the scenery. A shiver runs down her spine, despite the heat of the day.

“Fuck that shit,” she whispers out at the horizon.

“I’m not done yet. Remember Moscow?”

Of course she remembers Moscow. She’ll never be able to forget Moscow.

 

_It’s cold. She’d forgotten how cold it could get here. Though she knows in her head that she’s been places that get colder, recently even, there’s nothing quite like the feel of this particular bite._

_When the news had come back that Clint had been taken out of Dubna and dragged south to Moscow, Natasha had packed up what she’d been doing immediately, already planning who’d she reach out to for information first._

_She can just see him, in her mind’s eye, witty and charming while tied to an interrogation chair. But he’d been those things with her, and she’d still drawn her side arm on him. There was no way he’d get away from an ex-KGB group with a cocky grin and a refusal to draw his weapon._

_“But you’re not assigned to the rescue mission.” Said to her face by some gray-suited man without a full grasp on the situation._

_“Barton is the difference between my affiliation to SHIELD and a freelance gig.” It had been true at the time, and he’d read it in her eyes._

_They’d compromised, giving her a few weeks off to pursue a “personal project.” She’d found him six days later, bloody and barely recognizable in the back of an abandoned prison. She left more bodies behind during her escape with him than she had during her own defection. That had been business. This was personal._

_When they settle into the train station, curled on a bench, his hood up over his face to hide the worst of the damage, she’s the one who finds herself falling asleep. He jokes that it’s because he’s had plenty of time to sleep, what with all the unconsciousness, but she almost hates herself for the way her head drops onto his shoulder and her eyes close. But she’s just pushed herself too far for too long and she literally can’t remember the last time that she slept._

_As she fades out, she can hear the gentle murmur of a hundred voices, drowning her in anonymity. There a vague smell of something that might be urine, might be fish, and a gentle overhead announcement that no one can hear because it’s warring with the soft sound of music. What is that song? She knows that—_

“It played in the train station!” she remembers suddenly.

“I didn’t know if you were still awake for it or not. You were pretty tired.”

“I’m sorry for that, by the way. You’d had it a hundred times worse than I had. I didn’t have any right to fall asleep. Not when there was still blood on your face.”

“Want to know a secret?”

“Maybe?”

“I total slept, too. Few minutes after you did. Knocked out right there in the middle of Moscow. It’s a wonder we didn’t get yelled at. Or found. I doubt they let us go without a search, and we weren’t exactly subtle about where we’d gone.”

“Well. I did kill an awful lot of them. They might not have had the resources.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder why we took the later train to St. Petersburg? That hadn’t been the plan.”

“We took the later one?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

He doesn’t tell the rest of the story. The part he’s kept hidden in his mind since the moment he opened his eyes and saw her angelic form, wrapped in red hair and red blood, cutting him off the chair. He’ll take this secret to his grave.

Because the group that had taken him, hadn’t been there for his mission. They hadn’t given a shit what he was doing in the country. They hadn’t asked any questions about SHIELD or its affiliations.

It had been about her. A thousand questions about “their” Black Widow, and were she was, and did she know they were coming to punish her. Torture and starvation and isolation, endured because the only two words he said during their attempts to pry into her mind were, “Fuck you.”

It had been the first time he’d lied on an official report. If she still blames herself for falling asleep on a train station bench, she’ll never forgive herself for that.

The song is calming, and they sit silent against the words. _Why were you digging? What did you bury, before those hands pulled me from the earth?_

He wonders sometimes. What she has buried underneath that careful perfection. Even in their moments of abandon, her vulnerability is in the present. She offers him her “soul of the moment,” and he takes it gratefully. But sometimes he wonders what her “soul from the past” looks like.

He will never ask.

_I knew that look dear, eyes always seeking…I will not ask you were you came from. I would not ask and neither would you._

She wonders sometimes, why he chose her. And not in a self-deprecating way, because she knows what she has going for her. But she wants to know why a man in his mid-twenties, with all of life ahead of him, chose to climb onto a rooftop without so much as a knife on him. Why he’d offer his life like that, to someone so willing to take it.

She’ll never buy his story about a “feeling” or a “hunch,” no matter how many times he tells it. His actions hadn’t been a play by an Agent to win a recruit. He’d been tempting death. Asking for it.

Sometimes she wonders how deep that desire for death ran in him. She often wonders how deep it runs now.

She will never ask.

The chorus finishes its final repeat, and Clint reaches out and resets the song, starting it over with its gentle guitar chords within haunting vocals. He pushes harder against the accelerator. If they hit something at this speed, they won’t even know until it’s over.

The shadows of the setting sun stretch out behind them, lengthening slowly to touch the vehicle, no matter how fast they drive.


End file.
